10 Video Game Decisions That Ruined Your Entire Playthrough
4. Not Picking Up The Junk Mail - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Time for a majorly deep cut now, with 1984's text adventure game based on The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
In the opening moments, you'll end up on the front porch of your home, where the game will mention that the doormat has a pile of junk mail on it.
From here, you can decide to pick the mail up or ignore it, and doing the latter will have dire consequences for the rest of the story.
As it turns out, you need the junk mail later in the story to complete the tricky babel fish puzzle on the Vogon ship and continue progressing through the game.
Without it, you're effectively soft-locked out of beating the game, unable to move forward and forced to restart from the beginning.
This is the sort of cruel nonsense developers simply wouldn't get away with these days, but back in the heyday of text adventures, these harsh softlocks were infuriatingly common.